“Isn’t there anybody else up there who could lead us? What am I doing following a Mexican through the Peruvian Amazon?!” It was nearly midnight, moonless and black, in the dense, tropical jungle of Peru. Just ahead of me, I could only faintly discern the bulky form of my friend Ernie Neria, a Mexican/American pastor from Vineyard Christian Fellowship of El Paso, Texas. With his flashlight, Ernie was leading the way, trying to find the trail back to the riverboat we’d left tied up along the Marañon River, a winding tributary of the Amazon. But the flashlight’s batteries were going dead, and its feeble beam was now so weak that we could barely see three feet in front of us. With such a weak light, everything looked the same, making it almost impossible to distinguish between the scarcely used trail and the rest of the jungle. We had been stumbling along now for more than 45 minutes, tripping over the exposed roots of trees, sloshing through water and mud, slipping, falling, at times even crawling, in a desperate attempt to find our way. Our clothes were now soaked with sweat, our shoes, socks, and blue jeans up to the knees were wet and caked with slippery mud. Swarms of mosquitoes buzzed around us, many biting us right through our clothes. Were we ever going to get out of here, or would we end up as food for the myriads of jungle animals we heard around us, including the mosquitoes?
Meditations and teachings from the Bible and life